【the Karate KID】

It was surprisingly good. The film hews to the original closely enough to be sufficiently recognizable, but diverges where it might in order to color the character of the film, both visually by way of the vast natural beauty of China, and kinetically by way of Kung Fu. The bad guys speak very little English, communicating to the audience instead via subtitles, a moderately gutsy decision. The film gives Jackie Chan more meat to chew on with a brief look into his tragic back-story, taking him out of his comic comfort zone.

The movie is long, yet moves reasonably quickly; perhaps it moves too quickly in the sense of plot timeline, considering that Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) learns skills it takes a lifetime to master in the course of a few weeks. The supporting cast is good, with Dre's girlfriend Meiying stealing a scene here and there.

The Kung Fu training, a departure from the Karate of the original film, pays homage to both the demands of the outrageous Kung Fu of cinema legend and limitations of skilled practice in the real world such as you might believe. The bullies are definitely a step down from the scary skeleton-pajama clad California toughs of the original. These 12-year-old Kung Fu gangsters are mean, but you never get the impression the stern school principal couldn't slap them straight if they ever misbehaved in front of her. The evil master is good for his part, but we never get anything as resonant as the original's Cobra Kai. It is perhaps a failure of the daring reliance on subtitles that we don't get the cultural cues from these antagonists that we got from a suburban bad-guy karate school in sunny California.

p/s: 功夫比得不是进攻与防守，而是成熟与冷静。 Kung Fu is not about punches and parries, but maturity and calm.